Knowlog: A declarative language for reasoning about knowledge in distributed systems

Abstract

In the last few years, researchers started to investigate how recursive queries and deductive languages can be applied to find solutions to the new emerging trends in distributed computing. We conjecture that a missing piece in the current state-of-the-art in logic programming is the capability to express statements about the knowledge state of distributed nodes. In fact, reasoning about the state of remote nodes is fundamental in distributed contexts in order to design and analyze protocols behavior. To reach this goal, we leveraged Datalog ¬ with an epistemic modal operator, allowing the programmer to directly express nodes' state of knowledge instead of low level communication details. To support the effectiveness of our proposal, we introduce, as example, the declarative implementation of the two phase commit protocol. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.